3 hallmarks of successful digital government initiatives
Most digital projects don’t make it. Here’s how you can make yours stand the test of time.
As an American who spent most of my career working with early-stage startups as well as working in Silicon Valley, working for a government was one of the last places I’d ever thought I’d end up. Working for a foreign government was something I had never even considered.
It wasn’t until I worked for Tim Draper, a prolific American venture capitalist who has invested in companies like Tesla Motors and Skype and who happens to be one of the world’s first e-Residents, that I began to consider heading to Estonia.
The e-Residency program allows anyone in the world (my former boss included) to become online residents of Estonia and access Estonian e-services, in a country where 99% of government services are digitized.
In my role, I was responsible for making sure we hit our growth goals and were providing value for our users, in addition to managing partnerships with both private sector firms and various domestic and foreign government agencies.
So while privacy is still an issue with e-government, a much larger issue is trust. If your government can get access to your data no matter what, why should we settle for an inefficient paper based system that costs astronomic amounts to administer?
Now that I’m back in the United States, when I talk about my time in Estonia, many people comment about how they’ve heard about their prowess in e-government and have heard that Estonia is very forward thinking, but are often skeptical that many other countries, let alone the US, are capable of building digital services that are a joy to use.
While the road towards becoming a digitized government and society is long and full of pitfalls, I am sure it can be done by any country, given enough willpower and resources. After all, it’s not rocket science.
No country is born a digital winner
In the spirit of sharing knowledge in the hopes of providing a modicum of support to those embarking on the development of e-services, I wanted to share my top three lessons learned from my time in Estonia as to what enabled the country to be so successful at becoming a pioneer in e-government.
1) Trust
Having hosted many delegations and talked about Estonia’s e-government to public and private sector leaders from all over the world, I’m often met with skepticism from the more privacy-centric countries, especially those where there isn’t much good faith between citizens and representatives. A common question is whether e-government is desirable or even acceptable from a privacy standpoint.
I often answer in return: “Do you really think that the security services of your country couldn’t get any sort of information on you if they really wanted it?”
I’ve never heard anyone say no. So while citizens’ privacy is still an issue with e-government, a much larger issue is trust. If your government can get access to your data no matter what, why should we settle for an inefficient paper based system that costs astronomic amounts to administer?
But for governments and public officials that want to build e-governance systems: understand that privacy will be a major concern if you don’t have the trust of your citizens.
In order to gain the trust and engagement and to build the digital skills of the citizens of Estonia, the country embarked on a decades-long commitment to education of the populace as part of the Tiger Leap digitalization campaign. The campaign developed the population’s digital skills by providing IT training and resources to Estonians starting at a young age and helped imbue the population with a digital first mentality that has helped build the countries’ IT prowess.
If citizens trust that civil servants and whoever is in power will respect their rights, regardless of the ease of access they enjoy to the underlying data, then it will be much easier to convince folks to adopt and advocate for these systems.
2) Long term thinking
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is an e-government.
While many hailed the innovation and boldness of the e-Residency program, the fact is that it never would have been possible without the technical systems in place and the support of citizens. It took more than a decade to build that foundation and included systems that spanned across multiple administrations from different parties.
If e-government is a priority for your country, try to make it a nonpartisan issue that has support from all parties and is considered less of a “project” than a critical government service like defense or public works, because that is what it has the potential to be
e-Government, like almost any initiative, can easily become another program tossed to the wayside when the project instigators are no longer in power. If you want to build a successful e-government initiative, it will take many years and continuity is key.
Citizens and civil servants will be much less willing to convert to a digitized government and change their way of working and interacting with the government if they think that in two or three years the system will be abandoned.
If e-government is a priority for your country, try to make it a nonpartisan issue that has support from all parties and is considered less of a “project” than a critical government service like defense or public works, because that is what it has the potential to be. And once it becomes embedded, it becomes harder to undo. In Estonia, once the first steps were taken, returning to a paper-based system seemed counter-intuitive.
Internal politics will always have to be navigated, but I urge any civil servant or politician who is considering implementation of an e-government system to reach across to opposition groups and get the buy-in off all major players before embarking on your digitalization journey, to ensure that it is successful in the long run and isn’t made into an opposition campaign target and rendered politically toxic.
3) Public and private sector collaboration
While it is possible that all of the knowledge and expertise for developing an e-governance system could come from within the government, I believe that it is significantly more efficient to leverage the private sector.
This is something that I saw done admirably well in Estonia, with the government maintaining close relationships with local private sector companies that understood the government’s objectives and were driven not just by a profit motive but also out of a desire to make a more efficient government for all Estonians.
Working with private sector companies, even those that are not local, can help create shortcuts. If you are planning on building out a service like e-Residency or another service that already exists in Estonia, there is no reason just to go it alone
For instance, the development of the i-voting system, which Estonians use to vote in elections from their cell phone or computer, was developed in concert with Cybernetica — a local IT company that has developed deep domain expertise in the field who has since expanded out from Estonia to providing solutions to governments in the US, EU, and Africa.
By leaning on the private sector, the government also helps to add more capacity and build up local tech companies, which can then be a powerful force with knock-on effects as they expand domestically and internationally into other sectors with well-paid tech jobs and high-value services.
Additionally, working with private sector companies, even those that are not local, can help create shortcuts. If you are planning on building out a service like e-Residency or another service that already exists in Estonia, there is no reason just to go it alone.
A much more efficient way would be to work with the e-Governance academy, an Estonian nonprofit that offers study visits and e-learning for other governments. You could even leverage one of the many tech companies that helped build the infrastructure that the Estonian e-government was built on.
Trust, long term thinking and collaboration between the public and private sector. In retrospect, these core factors that led to the success of the Estonian government seem obvious, but in the moment it is easy to get lost in the weeds.
If you are a civil servant who is curious about e-Residency or other e-government initiatives in Estonia, feel free to connect with me, I am always happy to support innovators in government and facilitate connections whenever possible.
This article was initially published on Apolitical.
About the author
Joel Burke is an entrepreneur and innovator with a career spanning early-stage startups and investment in Silicon Valley to running a company in Berlin and heading business development for e-Residency, the Republic of Estonia’s flagship digital initiative. Currently, Joel is a Partner at Tribe AI, a boutique machine learning and AI consultancy and does pro-bono work for the CTO’s Office for the City of New York.
